DHAKA, March 30, 2018 (BSS) – The tax authority of Bangladesh has started working to develop a mechanism to identify the tax dodgers among the foreign nationals working in the country.
The National Board of Revenue (NBR) is developing a software and database to ensure the inclusion of all the foreign nationals in tax net, NBR officials said.
To this end, they said, the NBR decided to strengthen cooperation with the Special Branch (SB) of Police for getting detail information of the foreign nationals who have been working in the country.
The tax authority is also interested to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Special Branch for real-time data sharing (RTDS) and others.
The issue has been discussed at a recent meeting regarding the database and information sharing where representatives from the SB and different wings of the NBR were present, according to the meeting minutes.
A SB official said the Special Branch is ready to cooperate with the NBR to identify the foreign nationals who are currently out of tax net and dodging tax.
But, he feared, immigration service may hamper if the RTDS is provided.
The SB official suggested the NBR to open a separate unit for monitoring the foreign nationals.
At the meeting, NBR officials briefly focused on the areas where the NBR and the SB can work together to identity foreign tax-dodgers.
They said detail information of foreign nationals, including name, nationality, date of entry or exit and passport number, are needed for developing the database.
If information is exchanged, the database will be able to identify the foreign nationals who are dodging tax, the officials said.
According to the NBR officials, a good number of foreign nationals are currently working in Bangladesh bypassing registration with Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) and thus dodging tax. There are about 14,000 foreign nationals registered with the income-tax wing of the NBR, but their actual number should be two or three times more.